Anglo-Saxon Plant Remedies and the Anglo-Saxons
Author(s): Linda E. Voigts
Source: Isis, Vol. 70, No. 2 (Jun., 1979), pp. 250-268
Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of The History of Science Society
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/230791
Accessed: 10-04-2016 17:27 UTC
REFERENCES
Linked references are available on JSTOR for this article:
http://www.jstor.org/stable/230791?seq=1&cid=pdf-reference#references_tab_contents
You may need to log in to JSTOR to access the linked references.
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
http://about.jstor.org/terms
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted
digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about
JSTOR, please contact [email protected].
The History of Science Society, The University of Chicago Press are collaborating with JSTOR
to digitize, preserve and extend access to Isis
This content downloaded from 141.210.2.69 on Sun, 10 Apr 2016 17:27:01 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
Anglo-Saxon Plant Remedies and the
Anglo-Saxons
By Linda E. Voigts*
I N THE SURVIVING BODY of vernacular writing from Anglo-Saxon England,
medical texts, containing mostly remedies to be derived from plants, bulk large.
In addition to glossed remedies and short treatises,' four long Old English medical
works survive, three of them in unique manuscripts: the Lwceboc (Bald's Leechbook), Lacnunga, and Peri Didaxeon.2 The fourth text, the Herbarium Apulei, is the
Old English translation of the late antique herbal falsely attributed to Apuleius and
expanded to 185 plants by the addition of the treatise on betony of Antonius Musa
and some of the pseudo-Dioscoridean Ex herbisfemininis recipes; the plant remedies
*Department of English, University of Missouri, Kansas City, Missouri 64110.
This article is a revised version of a paper which was read at the conference on Nature in the Middle
Ages, at the State University of New York at Binghamton, October 1976, and at the Missouri Botanical
Garden, Saint Louis, Missouri, June 1977. I am grateful for the suggestions offered by Professor Bert
Hansen and by the staff of the Missouri Botanical Garden, particularly Dr. Charles Huckins. I also
acknowledge with gratitude the support provided for work with relevant manuscripts in British libraries in
1975 by a grant-in-aid of research from the American Council of Learned Societies.
'An example of a glossed recipe is the recipe "wi6 eahwaerce" written in the margin of p. 208 of
Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 41, a manuscript containing the Old English translation of the Historia
ecclesiastica of Bede. Shorter medical writings survive not only in glosses but are often sandwiched
between other writings as well; e.g., a treatise on the development of the fetus that might properly be called
medical is found in a collection of prognostics in British Library Cotton Tiberius A. iii, fols. 40v-41.
2A11 of the longer and many of the shorter Old English medical texts were edited in three volumes by
Thomas Oswald Cockayne in Leechdoms, Wortcunning, and Starcraft of Early England, Rolls Series, 35
(London, 1864-1866). These were reissued (London: Holland Press, 1961) with a new introduction by
Charles Singer, but the reprint, which omits Cockayne's introduction and the key to his apparatus criticus,
does not replace the Rolls Series volumes. Early in the 20th century some of the discrete texts were reedited. New editions are currently being prepared for the Lwceboc, the Herbarium Apulei, and Peri
Didaxeon.
The Lwceboc, which is made up of three collections of medical recipes that seem to derive from the
court of Alfred the Great, is in a MS from the mid-lOth century, British Library Royal 12 D. xvii, fols.
1-127v. See N. R. Ker, A Catalogue of Manuscripts Containing Anglo-Saxon (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1957), No. 264, and the facsimile of the codex, introduced by C. E. Wright: Bald's Leechbook, Early
English Manuscripts in Facsimile, 5 (Copenhagen: Rosenkilde and Bagger, 1955).
Lacnunga, which means "healings" or "cures," differs from the other texts in its high percentage of
charms and other magical elements. It occurs in a codex written in the late 10th or early 11th century,
British Library Harley 585, fols. 130-151v and 157-193. J. H. G. Grattan and Charles Singer edited the
Lacnunga in Anglo-Saxon Magic and Medicine (London: Oxford University Press, 1952). See the
discussion of the MS on pp. 206-209, and Ker, Catalogue, No. 231.
Peri Didaxeon, "Concerning Schools of Medicine," is found in a MS which may be as late as 1200 and
so is not included in Ker. The codex, British Library Harley 6258b, contains this text on fols. 51v-66v,
following the expanded Herbarium Apulei on fols. 1-51. The question of whether the language of this text
is late Old English or early Middle English is yet unresolved. Max Loweneck's edition in Erlanger Beitrage
zur englischen Philologie, 12 (Erlangen: Junge, 1896) emphasized the so-called Salernitan material in the
work, but Charles Talbot has since established that the Petrocellus-Gariopontus material is not Salernitan
at all and is found in the late-9th-century Lwceboc; "Some Notes on Anglo-Saxon Medicine," Medical
History, 1965, 9:156-169. The arguments concerning the stage of the language of Peri Didaxeon are
discussed in Peter Bierbaumer, Der botanische Wortschatz des Altenglischen, Teil II: La-cnunga, Herbarium Apuleii, Peri Didaxeon, Grazer Beitrage zur englischen Philologie, 2 (Bern: Herbert Lang, 1976), p.
xii.
ISIS, 1979, 70 (No. 252)
250
This content downloaded from 141.210.2.69 on Sun, 10 Apr 2016 17:27:01 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
ANGLO-SAXON PLANT REMEDIES 251
are followed by remedies obtained from animals, De taxone and the Medicina de
quadrupedibus of Sextus Placitus.3 This remedy book survives in four manuscripts,
one of which (British Library Cotton Vitellius C. iii) represents the plant and animal
sources of the remedies in brightly colored illustrations.4 Together these manuscripts
make up the earliest body of vernacular medical texts in medieval Europe. Closely
related to this tradition is the justly famous illustrated Latin manuscript of the
Pseudo-Apuleius herbal from Bury Saint Edmunds, at least some of which seems to
be a Latin rendering of the Old English text; it also contains Old English glosses.5
These Old English texts alone occupy more than five hundred leaves or one
thousand manuscript pages, and we cannot estimate the number of codices which
failed to survive because of changes in the language or such calamities as the dispersal
of monastic libraries in the sixteenth century and the Ashburnham House fire in the
eighteenth.6 What is clear, however, when one considers the number of animal skins
necessary for more than a thousand pages of manuscript text, is that these surviving
codices represent no small investment of resources and time on the part of AngloSaxon monastic houses. That observation alone justifies reopening the question of
the practicality of these Anglo-Saxon medical texts. Were they written to be used by
those who would heal? Would it have been possible in pre-Conquest England to
know and use the plants depicted in them? I think the answer to both questions is yes.
Although that answer may appear obvious to those who do not work in the
3The Latin text of the herbal without the pseudo-Dioscoridean recipes is found in Antonii Musae de
herba vettonica, liber Pseudoapulei herbarius, anonymi de taxone liber, Sexti Placiti liber medicinae ex
animalibus . . ., ed. Ernst Howald and Henry Sigerist, Corpus Medicorum Latinorum, 4 (Leipzig:
Teubner, 1927). On the attribution to the author of the Metamorphoses, see L. E. Voigts, "The Significance of the Name 'Apuleius' to the Herbarium Apulei," Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 1978,
52:214-227. This herbal was quite popular in the early Middle Ages. Howald and Sigerist discuss more
than 40 codices and fragments, and Augusto Beccaria lists 25 MSS surviving from before the 12th century
alone: I codici de medicina delperiodo Presalernitano (Rome: Edizione di Storia e Letteratura, 1956). See
also Henry Sigerist, "Zum Herbarius Pseudo-Apulei," Sudhoffs Archivfuir Geschichte der Medizin, 1930,
23:197-204; The Herbal of Pseudo-Apuleius from the Ninth Century MS. in the Abbey of Monte
Cassino-Codex Casinensis 97-Together with the First Printed Edition of Joh. Phil. de LignamineEditio princeps Romae 1481-both in Facsimile, ed. F. W. T. Hunger (Leyden: Brill, 1935); and the
facsimile of Vienna, Nationalbibliothek 93, with commentary by Charles Talbot and Franz Unterkircher,
Medicina antiqua libri quattuor medicinae, 2 vols. (Graz: Akademische Druck- u. Verlagsanstalt, 1972).
On the illustrative tradition of this herbal see Heide Grape-Albers, Spaitantike Bilder aus der Welt des
Arztes (Wiesbaden: Pressler, 1977), a study which lists four additional manuscripts. For a discussion of the
textual tradition and an edition of the so-called Sextus Placitus portion of the vernacular text, see Hubert
J. de Vriend, The Old English Medicina de Quadrupedibus, Dissertation, Groningen 1972 (Tilburg:
Giannoten, 1972).
4The three codices lacking illustrations are Harley 6258b, fols. 1-51, from the late 12th or early 13th
century; Harley 585, fols. 1-129v, from the late 10th or early 11th century; and Bodleian Hatton 76, fols.
68-130 (Ker, Catalogue, No. 328), from the mid-I Ith century, a MS written with spaces that correspond to
the illustrations in Cotton Vitellius C. iii. On Cotton Vitellius C. iii, fols. 11-85, a codex which seems to
date from after 1050, see Ker, Catalogue, No. 219; and L. E. Voigts, "A New Look at a Manuscript
Containing the Old English Translation of the Herbarium Apulei," Manuscripta, 1976, 20:40-60, and
1977, 21:62; and "One Anglo-Saxon View of the Classical Gods," Studies in Iconography, 1977, 3:3-16.
5Bodleian Bodley 130, fols. 1-95v (Ker, Catalogue, No. 302). For a facsimile and discussion of the MS,
see The Herbal of Apuleius Barbarus from the Early Twelfth-Century Manuscript formerly in the Abbey
of Bury St. Edmunds (MS. Bodley 130), described by Robert T. Gunther, Roxburghe Club Publications,
182 (London, 1925). For de Vriend's arguments that the section of Bodley 130 dealing with remedies to be
obtained from animals is a Latin rendering of the Old English text, see The Old English Medicina de
Quadrupedibus, pp. xlv-liii.
6The disastrous fire of 1731 which damaged many of the MSS in the Cotton Collection, including
Vitellius C. iii, was responsible for the near destruction of Otho B. xi, containing a number of herbal
recipes related to the Lwceboc and some which were independent of it; see Ker, Catalogue, No. 180.
Fortunately, a transcript of a large portion of the codex, copied by Laurence Nowell in 1562, survives as
British Library Add. 43703; the recipes are fols. 261-64v. See Roland Torkar, "Zu den ae. Medizinaltexten
in Otho B. XI und Royal 12 D. XVII, mit einer Edition der Unica," Anglia, 1976, 94:319-338.
This content downloaded from 141.210.2.69 on Sun, 10 Apr 2016 17:27:01 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
252
LINDA
E.
VOIGTS
sometimes arcane field of medieval herbals, it is neither the easy answer nor is it the
traditional one. Our understanding of the uses of pre-Salernitan written medicine,7
mostly drug therapy to be obtained from plants, has been dominated by two views
which must be reevaluated. The first is that the surviving codices manifest an
uncritical copying of classical texts with no real understanding and no thought to
their practical use. The most extreme statements of this view were articulated by
Charles Singer, who deplored the inability of "the wilting mind of the Dark Ages" to
deal intelligently with classical herbals and who described the entire corpus of AngloSaxon medical texts as "the darkest and deliquescent stage of a [sic] outdated
culture."8 This view was shared and disseminated by Wilfrid Bonser, who wrote:
"Sterile formulae, which could be applied without any exercise of reasoning, alone
survived for use during the Dark Ages. It is these, therefore, . . . which appear in
Anglo-Saxon medical practice."9
The second and related notion has to do with the depictions of plants in Cotton
Vitellius C. iii and Bodley 130. Historians of medicine and art historians alike assert
that these illustrations can have been of no practical value to the Anglo-Saxon user of
these codices for two reasons: first, the illustrations are stylized and botanically
inaccurate and are therefore unrecognizable; and second, a number of them represent
Mediterranean plants not found today north of the Alps.10 The issue of botanical
inaccuracy and stylization can be dealt with briefly. The illustration accompanying
the recipes using sage (Salvia officinalis L.) in Bodley 130 has been criticized because
the plant is not depicted with opposite leaves." In fact, some of the leaves in the
illustration are opposite and others are alternate, but more important they are
represented at an angle to the stem, which suggests, along with the coloring, that the
artist is portraying the dried plant, from which it is indeed difficult to discern if the
leaves are opposite or alternate. (See Fig. 1.) Furthermore, stylistic representations
are not by definition useless if one has had any experience with the depicted plant.
After all, even today one recognizes the plants on seed packages, knowing full well
7A useful though incomplete guide to the body of early medieval medical writing is Walter Puhlmann,
"Die lateinische medizinische Literatur des friihen Mittelalters," Kyklos, 1930, 3:395-416; this guide of
course omits vernacular texts. Most MSS containing early medieval medical texts are found in Beccaria, I
codici di medicina delperiodo Presalernitano. Although indispensable, Beccaria is not complete. The work
omits, e.g., the 9th-century Beneventan MS in Glasgow, Hunter T.4.13.
8 Charles Singer, "The Herbal in Antiquity," The Journal of Hellenic Studies, 1927, 47:31; Introduction
to the reprint of Leechdoms, Wortcunning and Starcraft, Vol. I, p. xlvii. See also his "Greek Biology and
its Relation to the Rise of Modern Biology," Studies in the History and Method of Science II, ed. Charles
Singer (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1921), p. 2.
9Wilfrid Bonser, The Medical Background of Anglo-Saxon England (London- Wellcome Historical
Medical Library, 1963 [prepared for publication 1949]), p. 35. This sort of statement is also pervasive in
popular treatments of the subject; e.g., in Ernst and Johanna Lehner, Folklore and Odysseys of Food and
Medicinal Plants (New York: Tudor, 1962), p. 98, one finds the following statement: "In the Dark Ages
many of the herbal manuscripts of early days were destroyed by the martial rulers and their mercenaries
who were devoid of any interest in science and culture."
t0See Thomas Downing Kendrick, Late Saxon and Viking Art (London: Methuen, 1949), p. 25, and
Kurt Weitzmann, "Das klassische Erbe in der Kunst Konstantinopels," Alte und neue Kunst, 1954, 3:50.
Similarly, Erich Bethe argued in Buch und Bild im Altertum (Leipzig: Harrassowitz, 1945), a work much
praised by Weitzmann (see Illustrations in Roll and Codex, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1947,
pp. 9-10), that plant illustration evolved from Lehrbild to Schmuckbild where the plant representations
were valued qua pictures, not as guides for acquiring the plants for medical remedies; he insisted (pp.
35-36) that in 12th-century Saxon-Norman herbals the plants could not be recognized from their
illustrations. Grape-Albers, whose focus is on the late antique origins of the herbal illustrations (Spdtantike Bilder) disagrees with Weitzmann regarding the function of the illustrations.
tt See the commentary on fol. 33v in The Herbal of Apuleius Barbarus from the Early Twelfth-Century
Manuscript. The leaves of the illustration depicting salvia in Cotton Vitellius C. iii (fol. 51r) are opposite.
This content downloaded from 141.210.2.69 on Sun, 10 Apr 2016 17:27:01 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
ANGLO-SAXON PLANT REMEDIES 253
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ .. . . .
| l | S | ~~~~~~~rX |I Wr4 11 g
iA~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~...;. . ..... ...
E~~~~~~ pbgm iim auiaaN S |
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~P
.
Figure 1. Sage, c. 1100, Herbarium Apulei, Bodley 130, fol. 33v.
(Reproduced by permission of the Bodleian Library.)
that the plants which one grows will not likely approximate the illustrations.'2
The question of whether or not Mediterranean plants could have been known in
Anglo-Saxon England is a more complex one to be dealt with at length below. An
influential instance of this traditional view is the statement made by Singer more than
once that the illustration labeled hennebelle in Cotton Vitellius C. iii (fol. 23v) was a
meaningless exercise because it represents the Mediterranean plant Hyoscyamus
reticulatus L., not the Hyoscyamus niger L. (henbane) that presently grows in
England.'3 I shall return to this example, but the point is clear that the dominant view
of Anglo-Saxon medical manuscripts in this century has been that "the whole herbal,
'2Charles Talbot put it aptly (Medicine in Medieval England, London: Oldbourne, 1967, pp. 20-21):
"The illustrations to these texts are formal rather than natural, and it has been inferred that those who
relied on them could not really distinguish or recognize any of the plants described; one might argue
equally well that the Anglo-Saxons could not recognize, from the formalized illustrations of buildings,
either a church or a monastery."
13"Greek Biology," pp. 76-77. Singer repeats this observation in his introduction to Grattan and Singer,
Anglo-Saxon Magic and Medicine, p. 28. Similarly, Gunther observes that "plants from which the original
pictures were taken belonged to a southern flora and either do not occur in Britain or were not available
when the scribe was at work on the manuscript"; The Herbal of Apuleius Barbarus, p. xxiv.
This content downloaded from 141.210.2.69 on Sun, 10 Apr 2016 17:27:01 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
254
LINDA
E.
VOIGTS
text and pictures, became quite useless as a practical manual."'14 Therefore, to argue,
as I do, that these herbals were copied for actual use with healing plants, it is
necessary to undertake a systematic reevaluation of these received notions in terms of
manuscript evidence and in terms of our current knowledge of early medieval
medicine, of early medieval trade, and of plant cultivation during the minimal
climatic optimum.
MEDICINE IN THE EARLY MIDDLE AGES
The dictum that early medieval medical texts epitomize uncritical copying of antique
medical texts must be revised by what we have learned in the last fifteen years about
early medieval medicine in general and by a specific examination of progressive
improvement in text and codex. Although we are dealing with largely uncharted
territory, we know, thanks to recent research, more about the deliberate encouragement in early medieval Benedictine houses of care for the sick (Rule 36) that is
therapeutic rather than simply custodial in nature,15 and we have learned that early
medieval medicine-monastic, ecclesiastical, and in some instances, lay-was pragmatic, empirical, and sometimes efficacious. The seminal work of Brian Lawn has
made clear that there was a theoretical base to early medieval medicine, albeit not one
devoted to the causes of diseases. Lawn's analysis of the standard early medieval
medical summa-a compendium containing both theoretical and pragmatic textssurviving in a number of codices, is invaluable. It makes convincing his argument
that the contributions of the Salernitan Adelhard of Bath were based on traditional
early medieval medicine and not on Arabic medicine. 16 Similarly, Charles Talbot has
established that the so-called Salernitan works of Gariopontus and Petrocellus were
in fact used and revised in ninth-century England, and recent analyses show the
validity of the treatment prescribed for a number of ailments in the Old English
remedy books.17
That the pragmatic, empirical practice of medicine in the early Middle Ages
probably resulted in better care than did the post-Salernitan school medicine devoted
to theoretical etiology has been suggested by John Riddle.18 This recent emphasis on
the early medieval focus on care of the sick rather than on cause of disease reminds us
of the importance of Soranus and pseudo-Soranic writings to the medieval transmission of medical texts.'9 It may also suggest, without demanding historical conti'4Otto Paicht, "Early Italian Nature Studies and the Early Calendar Landscape," Journal of the
Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 1950, 13:27.
15Heinrich Schipperges, Die Benediktiner in der Medizin des friihen Mittelalters (Leipzig: St. Benno,
1964); and Erna Patzelt, "Moines-m6dicins" in Etudes de civilisation medievale (IXe-XIIe siecles):
Mglanges offerts a Edmond-Rene Labande (Poitiers: Centre d'Etudes Superieures de Civilisation Me'dievale, 1974), pp. 577-588. For the text of a remarkable defense of medicine written in a Benedictine house c.
750-850, see Karl Sudhoff, "Eine Verteidigung der Heilkunde aus den Zeiten der 'Monchsmedizin',"
(Sudhoffs) Archiv far Geschichte der Medizin, 1913, 7:223-237. Also of value are Hanno Caprez, "Die
Klostermedizin," Ciba Zeitschrift, 1951, 11:4638-4666, and two studies of regional monastic medicine:
Claudius Franz Mayer, "Das Zeitalter der M5nchs- und Priestermedizin in Ungarn," Kyklos, 1930,
3:354-394; and F. Vercauteren, "Les medecins dans les principautes de la Belgique et du nord de la France,
du VIII, au XIIe siecle," Le Moyen Age, 1951, 57:61-92.
16Brian Lawn, The Salernitan Questions (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963), pp. 1-15; 20-21.
17Talbot, "Some Notes on Anglo-Saxon Medicine," pp. 156-169, and Medicine In Medieval England,
pp. 18-20. Stanley Rubin, Medieval English Medicine (New York: Harper & Row, 1974); see esp. pp. 128
and 131-137. The study of the efficacy of various treatments used in antiquity bears on the early medieval
texts which prescribe similar remedies; see Guido Majno, The Healing Hand: Man and Wound in the
Ancient World (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1975). See also Walter Lewis and Memory
P. F. Elvin-Lewis, Medical Botany (New York: Wiley, 1977).
'8John Riddle, "Theory and Practice in Medieval Medicine," Viator, 1974, 5:157-184.
19Lawn, The Salernitan Questions, pp. 8-11.
This content downloaded from 141.210.2.69 on Sun, 10 Apr 2016 17:27:01 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
ANGLO-SAXON PLANT REMEDIES 255
nuity, that early medieval medicine bears a number of resemblances to the methodist
sect of classical medicine, the discipline that disregarded the theories of disease
causation and concentrated instead on symptoms and therapeutics.
TEXT AND MANUSCRIPT
In revising the notion that medical texts were academic exercises, these general
studies provide a useful background. However, the narrower question of whether or
not Anglo-Saxon remedy books were meant to be used is best approached by a
consideration of the progressive improvement of texts in the course of their trans-
mission and of manuscripts in the course of their use. Four surviving manuscripts of
the Old English translation of the enlarged Pseudo-Apuleius herbal testify to the
popularity of this remedy book in Anglo-Saxon England, and an examination of
some of the changes made in the transmission of this text of late antique origin proves
instructive. In its original form the Herbarium seems to have consisted of 130
chapters, each including a depiction of the plant and then a list of remedies provided
by the particular simple. In the transmission of this herbal, not only were other plant
chapters added, but changes were made in the book to make it a more useful
pharmacopeia; lists of synonyms to the plant names were added to each chapter20 and
sometimes information concerning the habitat of the plants. Many chapters, like the
one on scelerata (cluffiunje, Ch. 9), in the Old English version contain information
about the ground where the plant best grows. The vernacular text provides this
information before the recipes are given, whereas in the standard Latin text (Ch. 8), it
is found at the end of the chapter.21
Particularly interesting is the vernacular treatment of the information provided
concerning the first plant, betony, source of twenty-nine remedies in the Old English
version (forty-seven in the Latin). Betony is simply entered as the first chapter of the
Old English herbal, whereas in the Latin it is a separate treatise, "Antonii Musae de
herba vettonica liber," almost always found preceding the Herbarium Apulei. What
is important here is that the Old English text omits the Latin discussions that are not
essential for obtaining the plant and using it as a remedy, and it unites at the
beginning of the chapter essential information from two discussions. From the
introductory Latin material the Old English omits the greetings of Antonius Musa to
M. Agrippa and the celebration of betony over other plants; it retains the instructions
for gathering betony in August without the use of iron and for drying it. From the
concluding material in the Latin text the Old English omits the prayer or incantation
to the plant and takes only the statements concerning the use of the plant for soul or
body or as a shield against nocturnal visitors and frightening visions and the
statement regarding habitat ("nascitur in pratis et in montibus, locis mundis et opacis
circa frutices . . ."). This information in the Old English text differs from the Latin in
that it does not come after the twenty-nine remedies, however; it is the first information provided on the plant before the instructions on gathering and drying it are
given:" Jpeos wyrt Je man betonicam nemnet heo bip cenned on maedum 7 on
clxnum dunlandum 7 on lelfriJedum stowum...." (This plant, which one calls
betony, is produced in meadows, and on open moor lands, and in shady places....)
20The addition of synonyms and tables of contents is discussed in Sigerist, "Zum Herbarius PseudoApulei," pp. 197-198.
21For the Old English text, see Cockayne, Leechdoms, Vol. I, p. 98, and for the Latin text, see Howald
and Sigerist, Antonii Musae, pp. 39-40. Bodley 130, containing a text that may be a translation back to
Latin from Old English (see above, n. 5), also provides the habitat of the plant at the beginning of the
entry.
This content downloaded from 141.210.2.69 on Sun, 10 Apr 2016 17:27:01 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
256
LINDA
E.
VOIGTS
In short, what we find in the Old English version is what might be called an
"improved" text, a version easier to use than the Latin. Inessential information, some
of it magical, has been omitted, and the information important to anyone who might
want to find, dig, and dry the plant has been combined from two locations in the
Latin and placed at the beginning of the chapter. The redactor, whether he was
working in the vernacular or composing a Latin intermediary, was concerned with
making the text a useful one. That he may well have been successful is indicated by
the habitat entry for Betonica officinalis L. in Polunin's Flowers of Europe: "Meadows, heaths, woods. June-Oct. All Eur."22
Another change in the history of Herbarium Apulei which made it more practical
is the addition of tables of contents to enable the user to find a remedy for an ailment
without reading through a codex chapter by chapter. In two of the Latin recensions
one finds tituli morborum, which provide what strikes the twentieth-century reader as
a sophisticated information retrieval system-implying that the information is worth
getting to. The tituli morborum are listings by ailments in the traditional head-to-foot
order; under each entry, like ad capitisfracturam, is listed the numbers of those plant
chapters containing a remedy for that ailment.23 In the Anglo-Saxon herbals, how-
ever, one finds the simpler contents list which cites the plant chapters and under each
plant name gives the list of ailments or symptoms for which the plant supplies
remedies. Although this arrangement is less sophisticated than the tituli morborum, it
still helps the user find a recipe. The user of Cotton Vitellius C. iii could move quickly
to an entry in the text by matching the rubricated numeral from the contents list with
the rubricated numeral at the top of the text leaf. The contents list in this codex (fols.
12-18v) is written in a color-key system as well; it distinguishes among the recipes
listed by ailment under the plant names by varying the colors of the upper-case letters
beginning the entries. That a contents list was considered important is testified to by
the fact that in two Anglo-Saxon codices of the Pseudo-Apuleius herbal-the Old
English Harley 585 (fols. 115-129v) and the Latin Bodley 130 (fols. 73-75)-the
contents tables were added after the completion of the text. In Bodley 130 it is clear
that the rubricated numerals which identify the chapters were coordinated with the
selective list of contents in the manner of Cotton Vitellius C. iii and were added by the
later scribes who supplied that table.
Two other observations on the improvement of the Pseudo-Apuleius remedy book
should be made. At Saint Gall a ninth-century herbal survives which seems to have
originated there (Stiftsbibliothek 217). It contains entries for sixty-two plants. Thirty-
six of the chapters derive from the Herbarium Apulei, but twenty-six have no known
source, and a number of those seem to be the addition of alpine plants. One finds as
well entries which vary from the Herbarium Apulei in the addition of such details as
"nascitur in excelsis montis juxta aquas" (Ch. 13, ginciana).24 It may also be significant that the Ex herbis femininis treatise which accompanies the Pseudo-Apuleius
herbal in the Old English texts seems to be a sophisticated reworking of Dioscoridean
materials by someone in Ostrogothic Italy who knew the plants in the treatise.25
Other medical texts surviving from Anglo-Saxon England reward an examination
22Cockayne, Leechdoms, Vol. I, p. 70; Howald and Sigerist, Antonii Musae, pp. 3-4, 11. See Oleg
Polunin, Flowers of Europe (London: Oxford University Press, 1969), p. 359. The identification for
Betonica officinalis L. is now Stachys officinalis (L.) Trev.
23See Sigerist, "Zum Herbarius Pseudo-Apulei," pp. 197-198.
24The text of this herbal and a discussion of it are to be found in Erhard Landgraf, "Ein friihmittelalterlicher Botanicus," Kyklos, 1928, 1:114-146; ginciana is found on p. 128.
25See Riddle, "Theory and Practice," p. 163. Riddle's forthcoming publications which unravel the vexed
tradition of Ex herbisfemininis recipes are of major importance to the study of early medieval herbals.
This content downloaded from 141.210.2.69 on Sun, 10 Apr 2016 17:27:01 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
ANGLO-SAXON PLANT REMEDIES 257
with conclusions similar to those deriving from the Herbarium Apulei. The -Lacnunga
contains entries, to be mentioned again, that prescribe, like the ninth-century Saint
Gall antidotary, a plant remedy discovered by the Arabs but unknown to the
ancients.26 Another indication that Latin medical texts were meant to be used by
Anglo-Saxons who knew the plants by vernacular names is the various surviving
word lists giving vernacular words for Latin plant names. One can find plant names
in the better-known general glossaries like the Corpus, Harley, and Antwerp glossaries,27 but of particular interest are two that are made up of plant lists: the Durham
Herbal Glossary and the Laud Herbal Glossary. Both survive in manuscripts containing Latin medical texts, and it is clear that they have been added to the texts to make
the Latin remedies usable for someone who knows the relevant plants by their
vernacular names.28 As has already been mentioned, eight of the plants in the
illustrated Latin Bury Saint Edmunds herbal are identified in a contemporary hand
by their Old English names, and the Latin herbal in Bodleian Ashmole 1431 contains
fifty-seven vernacular glosses.
Perhaps the best instance of an Anglo-Saxon vernacular medical text that gives
every indication of being intelligently compiled for practical use is the Laceboc, the
so-called Leechbook of Bald. Consisting of three books, the first two of which are
closely related to the circle of King Alfred, it survives in the unique manuscript which
may have been copied at the Old Minster, Winchester, circa 950-960. No single Latin
source for any of the three books is known; the books seem to be an intelligent
amalgam of various Latin sources, such as Alexander of Tralles, Marcellus of
Bordeaux, and the Gariopontus-Petrocellus material already mentioned.29 The compilation of these books containing herbal remedies and relatively sophisticated
surgical procedures may suggest a longstanding tradition of vernacular medicine, for
there is some philological evidence that at least part of the compiled material already
existed in Old English.30 A study of the text of the Laceboc, like a study of the other
Old English medical texts and plant glossaries, makes it difficult to persevere in the
26See Bierbaumer, Der botanische Wortschatz des Altenglischen, Teil II, s.v. sideware (pp. 103-104) and
John Riddle, "The Introduction and Use of Eastern Drugs in the Early Middle Ages," Sudhoffs Arch.,
1965, 49:190-192.
270n the MS Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 144, a word list from the 8th or 9th century containing
more than 2,000 words, see Ker, Catalogue, No. 36, and An Eighth-Century Latin-Anglo-Saxon Glossary,
ed. J. H. Hessels (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1890). Regarding the glossary in British
Library Harley 3376, see Ker, No. 240, and The Harley Latin-Old English Glossary, ed. Robert T.
Oliphant (The Hague: Mouton, 1966); some scattered fragments from this glossary remain unpublished,
e.g., Kansas University, Spencer Research Library, Pryce P2A: 1. The Latin-Old English glossary in
Antwerp, Plantin-Moretus Museum 47, is arranged under subject headings; see Ker, No. 2, and Max
F6rster, "Die ae. Glossenhandschrift Plantinus 32 (Antwerpen) und Additional 32246," Anglia, 1917,
41 :94-161.
28On Durham, Cathedral Hunter 100, fols. 82-84v, see Ker, Catalogue, No. 110, and "Das Durhamer
Pflanzenglossar," ed. Bogislav von Lindheim, Beitrdge zur englischen Philologie, 1941, 35:1-81. On the
250 Old English words in the glossary of herb names in Bodleian Laud Misc. 567, fols. 68-73, see Ker, No.
345, and The Laud Herbal Glossary, ed. J. Richard Stracke (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1974).
29The extensive analysis of the efficacy of Lwceboc treatments in Rubin's Medieval English Medicine
bears mention again as does Talbot's "Some Notes on Anglo-Saxon Medicine." Two useful studies on
book production at Winchester in the late 9th and 10th centuries bear on Bald's Leechbook: Audrey
Meaney, "King Alfred and his Secretariat," Parergon, 1975, 11:16-24, and M. B. Parkes, "The Palaeography of the Parker Manuscript of the Chronicle, Laws and Sedulius, and Historiography at Winchester in
the late Ninth and Tenth Centuries," Anglo-Saxon England, 1976, 5:149-171.
30Torkar, "Zu den ae. Medizinaltexten," pp. 323, 326-327. A 9th-century fragment containing Old
English recipes, Louvain, Bibliotheque de l'Universite, Fragmenta H. Qmont 3, has recently been noticed;
it provides important evidence of early vernacular medical writing. See Angus Cameron and Bella T.
Schauman, "A Newly-Found Leaf of Old English from Louvain," Anglia, 1977, 95:289-312; and N. R.
Ker, "A Supplement to Catalogue of Manuscripts Containing Anglo-Saxon," Anglo-Saxon England,
1976, 5:128 (No. 417).
This content downloaded from 141.210.2.69 on Sun, 10 Apr 2016 17:27:01 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
258
LINDA
E.
VOIGTS
notion that surviving manuscripts represent mindless copying of sterile formulae.
For further confirmation that early medieval medical texts were not copied as
academic exercises, it is necessary to examine the surviving manuscripts for evidence
of use and for what might be called "improvement in codex" rather than "improve-
ment in text," that is to say, for additions to manuscripts by users. The addition of
contents lists in later hands to two of the Anglo-Saxon herbals (Harley 585 and
Bodley 130, where the chapters were also rubricated to agree with the contents list in
the manner of Cotton Vitellius C. iii) has already been mentioned, as has the color-
key system in the Cotton Vitellius C. iii contents list. That these lists were used and
could be personalized can be inferred from the marginal nota sign added to the
content listing wit untrumnesse on folio 68v of the Pseudo-Apuleius herbal in
Hatton 76 and the identical idiosyncratic nota sign penned beside the corresponding
recipe on folio 77; surely some user of the remedy book found a recipe valuable and
wanted to signal it in both the contents list and the text so he could find it quickly.
Similarly, it is possible to turn quickly to the herbal which begins on folio 68 of
Hatton 76 without thumbing through the codex; a leather tag has been sewn to the
folio.
Marginal notations provide evidence of use, although it is impossible to be certain
what meaning the signs had for those consulting the codex; they may have been used
to mark a passage for future reference or they may have been made in the process of
recopying the codex. Whatever the reason, a number of users have made notations in
the Lwceboc, and these have been largely disregarded in discussions of the manuscript. There are seventeen silver circles painted in the margin of Royal 12 D. xvii at
various points and twenty-five notation signs in ink, most of them marks in the shape
of an X or a plus sign. There are even more drypoint notation signs, and they are
mostly larger than the ink signs; most of them X-marks or cross-marks. In addition,
the codex displays nearly thirty elongated nota signs which, Ker suggests (No. 264),
indicate that the manuscript was read in the twelfth or thirteenth century. There are
other sorts of marginal notations as well; in four instances marginal Latin comments
have been scratched out, although one Latin gloss does survive, as do two Old
English correction glosses. Marginal neums are also to be found on folios 30v and
89v.
Perhaps the strongest indication that an Anglo-Saxon medical manuscript was
considered a living remedy book and not an artifact is the addition of other recipes by
later users. Many instances of this practice can be found in the illustrated vernacular
herbal in Cotton Vitellius C. iii. Previously unnoticed fragments of later writing
around a hole on folio 11 are part of a recipe using senecion.31 On the last leaf of the
Sextus Placitus portion of the herbal, folio 82v, begins an accumulation of miscellaneous Latin and Old English recipes in different eleventh- and twelfth-century
hands. These recipes end on folio 83v and are followed by a Latin tract on urine in a
twelfth-century hand on folios 84-85. Folio 18v, following the contents list and
preceding the ornamental title and author portrait, was originally blank, except for
three words. The leaf now contains, in the left column and a portion of the right, two
Old English recipes with Latin titles in red, "ad vertiginem" and "ad pectoris
dolorem." It should also be mentioned that the illustrator or colorist has supplied, in
a number of instances, vernacular plant names to label the illustrations.32 Yet another
31It is possible to make out "ad ner. 7dolorecl ... /cum axungia et alia.senecio. pecto/lib.rum vitica." A
relevant recipe is the third remedy in Ch. 76 of the Herbarium Apulei, "Ad pedum tumorem vel dolorem
aut idem nervorum. Herba senecion tunsa cum axungia .. ." (italics mine).
32See Voigts, "A New Look," pp. 41-42, for a discussion of these labels. One might conclude that those
illustrations that bear the artist's vernacular labels (in spelling that sometimes varies from that of the text)
This content downloaded from 141.210.2.69 on Sun, 10 Apr 2016 17:27:01 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
ANGLO-SAXON PLANT REMEDIES 259
addition is on the leaf facing the beginning of the herbal, folio lOv; this leaf contains
in the right column the Latin names of seventy-eight plants in a twelfth-century hand
with barely discernible Old English glosses above twenty-one of them. This list
consists of those plants treated in the popular Latin poem attributed to Macer (Odo
of Meung) and usually titled either "De viribus herbarum" or "De virtutibus her-
barum."33 All of these examples of "improvement in codex" make it clear that not
only were Anglo-Saxon medical books intended to be used, they were also subject to
alteration and addition to make them better guides to healing.
ECCLESIASTICAL EXCHANGE AND COMMERCIAL TRADE
IN THE EARLY MIDDLE AGES
The evidence of the use of these remedy books brings one to the question of the
availability of plants discussed and depicted in them. The answer to that question is
both another way of countering the first dictum that Anglo-Saxon medical books are
academic exercises and of responding to the second, that texts and illustrations were
useless where they involve plants not indigenous to transalpine Europe, a reservation
that applies to medical texts deriving from antiquity34 as well as to those early
medieval texts which incorporate Arab discoveries like galingale and zedoary.35 The
fact of the matter is that Mediterranean and Eastern plants could be had in Europe
throughout the early Middle Ages both in a not-for-profit exchange and by way of
commercial trade. First, there is a good deal of evidence of exchange among individual ecclesiastics and between religious houses. Too much should not be made of the
(c. 754) letter of Bishop Cynehard of Winchester to Lull in Mainz asking for medical
books because those he had dealt with ingredients unknown to him and difficult to
obtain.36 The letter seems less typical to me than one of the several early-eleventhcentury letters of Fulbert of Chartres which deal with the dispatch of herbs; Fulbert
says in a letter which accompanies a packet of medicines and herbs for Adalbero of
Laon that Adalbero can easily find the instructions for the administration of the
medicines in his own antidotaria.37 Other continental examples can be cited. Gregory
of Tours refers to the exchange of herbs between monastic houses, and Alcuin writes
of the death of one Basil who had formerly conveyed medicines to the recipient of the
identify the plants the artist himself knew. Dr. Charles Huckins suggests that one would indeed expect a
colorist to be familiar with native plants because much of his pigment was of vegetable origin.
33Ker, Catalogue, No. 218. The poem was probably written by Odo of Meung in the first half of the 11th
century. It consists of 2,269 hexameter lines on the virtues of plants. See Macer Floridus de viribus
herbarum, ed. Ludwig Choulant (Leipzig: Vossius, 1832); A Middle English Translation of Macer
Floridus de viribus herbarum, ed. Gosta Frisk (Uppsala:' Lindequistska, [1949]); Max Manitius, Geschichte der lateinischen Literatur des Mittelalters (Munich: Beck, 1911-1931), Vol. II, pp. 539-547; and
Bruce P. Flood, Jr., "The Medieval Herbal Tradition of Macer Floridus," Pharmacy in History, 1976,
18:62-66.
mOn the use (as opposed to study or transmission) of classical medical texts in the Middle Ages, see
Riddle, "The Introduction," pp. 189-198 and a number of articles by Jerry Stannard: "Greco-Roman
Materia Medica in Medieval Germany," Bull. Hist. Med., 1972, 46:455-468; "Medieval Reception of
Classical Plant Names," Revue de Synthese, 3rd Ser., 1968, 49-52:153-162; "Eastern Plants and Plant
Products in Medieval Germany," Proceedings, XIII International Congress of the History of Science,
Moscow 1971, 1974, Sec. 4: 220-225; "Squill in Ancient and Medieval Materia Medica, with Special
Reference to its Employment for Dropsy," Bulletin of the New York Academy of Medicine, 2nd Ser.,
1974, 50 (No. 6): 684-713.
35 See above, n. 26, and Jerry Stannard, "Benedictus Crispus, an Eighth Century Medical Poet," Journal
of the History of Medicine, 1966, 21:41.
36Ep. 114 in Die Briefe des heiligen Bonifatius und Lullus, ed. Michael Tangl, Monumenta Germaniae
Historica, Ep. sel., 1 (Berlin, 1916).
37 The Letters and Poems of Fulbert of Chartres, ed. and trans. Frederick Behrends (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1976), Letter 47, p. 82; see also Letters 48, 24, 49.
This content downloaded from 141.210.2.69 on Sun, 10 Apr 2016 17:27:01 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
260
LINDA
E.
VOIGTS
letter.38 I have found three instances in the correspondence of Boniface where the
Roman ecclesiastics specify the herbs and spices they are sending to the Anglo-Saxon
archbishop in Germany.39 A letter survives, in a ninth-century formulary, which may
have been written by Walahfrid Strabo, requesting seeds of chive which were not to
be bought in France.40
While continental practice may suggest an analogous situation in pre-Conquest
England, more important for a consideration of Anglo-Saxon medical books is the
evidence of ecclesiastical exchange of plants among Anglo-Saxons. Denehard, Lull,
and Burchard of the eighth-century Anglo-Saxon mission to Germany wrote of
sending pepper and cinnamon along with frankincense to Abbess Cuniburg in
England (739-741).41 Saint Willibald, the widely travelled native of Wessex who
became Bishop of Eichstadt around 740, seems to have been an amateur trafficker in
controlled substances. In 726 he obtained balsam in Jerusalem and was able to
smuggle it through customs at Tyre by passing it off as petroleum in a gourd which
did indeed contain petroleum in the outer segment.42 Another important instance
seems to be implied in chapters near the end of the Book II of the Leceboc of Bald
(Royal 12 D. xvii, fols. 105v-106r) where we are told that the recipes given there had
been ordered to be told to King Alfred by Elias III, Patriarch of Jerusalem (c.
879-907). That these recipes, which call for Levantine ingredients-scammony,
ammoniacum, tragacanth, galbanum, balsam, and petroleum-were transmitted to
Alfred along with the ingredients has been inferred on the basis of Asser's telling of
Elias sending gifts as well as letters to Alfred.43
As the reference to the customs station deluded by Willibald's strategem implies,
commercial trade in medicinal herbs and control thereof certainly occurred in the
early Middle Ages alongside the more informal exchanges of churchmen and religious houses. In the late seventh and early eighth centuries the monks of Corbie
imported "considerable quantities" of herbs from Marseilles,44 and a ninth-century
shopping list survives from that house as well-a list of twenty-three herbs, mostly
exotica, to be purchased "at the market," perhaps in Cambrai.45 In 793 a Spanish
Muslim visiting Mainz marvelled at the quantity of "Indian" spices to be found
there.46 We know the Carolingians obtained herbs from Spain, Africa, and the
Levant by trading in Provence, and overland trade through Lombardy during the
seventh through the ninth centuries seems to have involved herbs, was closely
38Caprez, "Die Klostermedizin," p. 4654. Ep. 45 in Alcuini epistolae, ed. E. Duemmler, Monumenta
Germaniae Historica, Ep. 4, Carolini Aevi, 2 (Berlin, 1892).
39Ep. 62, 84, 85 in Die Briefe des heiligen Bonifatius und Lullus.
40Wilfrid Blunt, "Walahfrid Strabo," in The Hortulus of Walahfrid Strabo (Pittsburgh: Hunt Botanical
Library, 1966), p. 12.
41Ep. 49 in Die Briefe des heiligen Bonifatius und Lullus.
42"The Travels of Willibald, A.D. 721-727, Written from his own Recital by a Nun of Heidenheim," in
Early Travels in Palestine, ed. Thomas Wright (London: Henry G. Bohn, 1848), p. 21. See also Robert S.
Lopez, "The Trade of Medieval Europe: The South," in The Cambridge Economic History of Europe, Vol.
II, ed. M. Postan and E. E. Rich (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1952), p. 263. The identification of balm or balsam is difficult: among the possibilities are Balanites aegyptiaca Delile, Commiphora
opobalsamum Engl., Populus gileadensis Rouleau, and Impatiens balsamina L.
43See Wright's discussion of this passage in the prefatory material to the facsimile, Bald's Leechbook,
pp. 17-18.
44Lopez, "The Trade of Medieval Europe," p. 261. Invaluable for information on the Roman trade
system, some of which survived into the Middle Ages, is J. Innes Miller, The Spice Trade of the Roman
Empire: 29 B.C. to A.D. 641 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969); see esp. the table of 84 "Spices of the
Roman Empire," pp. 112-118.
45For the list, see Riddle, "Introduction," p. 194; see also Lopez, "The Trade," p. 261.
46Lopez, "The Trade," p. 273.
This content downloaded from 141.210.2.69 on Sun, 10 Apr 2016 17:27:01 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
ANGLO-SAXON PLANT REMEDIES 261
regulated, and, by special agreement, favored Anglo-Saxon traders.47 It is also worth
remembering that the depots administered by the government of the Eastern Empire
to control foreign trade were called a-orOi7Kat, the word which came later to
mean a storehouse for drugs and in the form we now know it, apothecary, to mean a
dispensary.48 To be sure, we cannot assume that the amarium pigmentarum of an
Anglo-Saxon house contained all the plants for 185 chapters of the Herbarium
Apulei, but there is certainly evidence to conclude that at least some of the Mediterranean plants would have been available through trade.
PLANT CULTIVATION: THE MINIMAL CLIMATIC OPTIMUM
Even with the explanations of the availability of southern plants to Northern Europe
via trade, we are still left with the objection to the usefulness of herbal illustrations
which depict southern plants; one has no need for the illustration of a living plant if
one can obtain sap, oil, dried leaves, or seeds in trade. However, this traditional
judgment, like the first, bears reassessing, in this case in terms of recent research in
palaeoclimatology and in terms of a careful study of the monastic herb garden.
Traditional disparagement of Anglo-Saxon herbal illustrations by historians of
medicine and art seems to have assumed that the climatic conditions and floristic
zones of Europe today prevailed in the Middle Ages as well,49 and indeed, under
present circumstances, manuscript miniatures of Mediterranean plants seem inappropriate for England. Climatic conditions during the Anglo-Saxon period were,
however, not the same as they are today, and although most of us have a vague
notion that Greenland once was green and that Vinland was not a fantasy in A.D.
1000, that information has had little impact on our understanding of the AngloSaxon world. To my knowledge, no one has attempted to accommodate the question
of southern plants in Anglo-Saxon herbals to the recent work in palaeoclimatology
and its related disciplines, palynology, dendrochronology, and historical phytogeography. It is time to do that.
Speculation on the impact of climate change on historical civilizations is crucial to
some recent explanations linking the decay of Mediterranean civilizations in two
different instances to periods of Saharalike conditions in that region (accompanied
by a corresponding amelioration of weather conditions in the North of Europe). For
example, the decline of Byzantine civilization in the seventh through the eleventh
centuries has been linked to the famine, plague, and depopulation that were a
consequence of the reduced rainfall of the climate change.50 Of late, similar explanations for historical patterns in Northern Europe have been offered. Behind these
explanations lie, for English history at least, the important work in palaeoclimatology of H. H. Lamb and the application of this sort of study to historical interpretation, particularly in regard to continental Europe, by Emmanuel LeRoy Ladurie.51
What seems clear now is that the history of Northern Europe was decidedly
47Ibid., pp. 271, 279.
48Ibid., p. 275. Surely many if not most of the Eastern drugs required in the 9th-century Saint Gall
antidotary and discussed in detail by Riddle in "Introduction," pp. 186-189, were obtained through trade.
490n the phytogeography of the present-day British Isles, see Harry Godwin, The History of the British
Flora (2nd ed., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), pp. 448-450.
5ORhys Carpenter, Discontinuity in Greek Civilization (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966);
see esp. pp. 1-17.
51See H. H. Lamb, "The Early Medieval Warm Epoch and its Sequel," Palaeogeography, Palaeoclima-
tology, Palaeoecology, 1965, 1:13-37, and his volume of selected papers, The Changing Climate (London:
Methuen, 1966); Emmanuel LeRoy Ladurie, "Aspects historiques de la nouvelle climatologie," Revue
This content downloaded from 141.210.2.69 on Sun, 10 Apr 2016 17:27:01 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
262
LINDA
E.
VOIGTS
affected by what is called the "minimal climatic optimum," or the "secondary climatic
optimum"-that is to say, a period from around the ninth century to the thirteenth
when the climate of Northern Europe was warmer and drier than it has been since,
even in the comparatively warm period of the first half of the twentieth century.52
During the peak of this xerothermic period, circa A.D. 1000-1200, mean annual
temperatures in Northern Europe were at least 1P to 2? C higher than they are now,
53
and annual rainfall was 10 percent less than its present amount.54 This was the era of
population buildup and overflow in Scandinavia, the time, in short, of good centuries
for the North of Europe and bad for the South.55 This era was followed by a period
from 1200 to 1400 of climatic decline in Northern Europe56 (and an upswing in
Mediterranean civilization57) and a period of partial recovery from 1400 to 1550
before the "little Ice Age" of 1550 to 1850.58
While these climate changes can be discerned from growth patterns of trees in
North America and Japanese annual records of the date of the first cherry blossoms
that go back to the ninth century,59 it is European evidence that pertains here. During
the minimal climatic optimum, preglacial trees thrived at heights in the Alps where
they have failed to grow since, even in the comparatively warm twentieth century.60
Of particular importance for the Anglo-Saxon world are the archaeological evidence
and the written records of Anglo-Saxon vineyards. The Domesday Book recorded in
1085 thirty-eight vineyards in England in addition to those of the king. English wine
was considered equal to that of France in terms of quality as well as quantity; there
were more than half a dozen vineyards of over five acres, and at least some of them,
as in Gloucestershire and at Thorney, were unprotected. A vineyard was maintained
at Ely for several centuries.6' Similarly, remains of medieval tillage, evidenced by
surviving ridge and furrow, indicate that plowing went on in Redesdale in Northum-
Historique, Jan.-Mar., 1961, 225:1-20, and Times of Feast, Times of Famine: A History of Climate since
the Year 1000, trans. Barbara Bray (Garden City: Doubleday, 1971). Of importance for future work in this
area will be D. Justin Schove's forthcoming climatic history of Europe from A.D. 800.
52Lamb, "The Early Medieval Warm Epoch," passim, and three essays in The Changing Climate: "On
the Nature of Certain Climatic Epochs which Differed from the Modern (1900-39) Normal," pp. 58-112;
"Our Changing Climate, Past and Present," pp. 1-20; and "Britain's Climate in the Past," pp. 170-195. See
also LeRoy Ladurie, Times of Feast, pp. 254-264.
53See LeRoy Ladurie, Times of Feast, p. 127, and Lamb, "The Early Medieval Warm Epoch," p. 13. It
may be noted that in 1959 Lamb asserted that the peak was 800-1000 ("Our Changing Climate, Past and
Present," p. 7).
54LeRoy Ladurie, Times of Feast, pp. 254-257; Lamb, "The Early Medieval Warm Epoch," p. 13.
Particularly valuable are Lamb's summer dryness/wetness and winter mildness/severity indices, in The
Changing Climate, pp. 100, 182, and the tables on pp. 21-27, "The Early Medieval Warm Epoch."
55Carpenter, Discontinuity in Greek Civilization, p. 15. Scandinavian population expansion to the New
World was, of course, possible because of climatic conditions of Greenland; see W. Dansgaard, et al., "One
Thousand Centuries of Climatic Record from Camp Century on the Greenland Ice Sheet," Science, 1969,
166:377-381.
56Lamb, "Our Changing Climate, Past and Present," pp. 8-10. For records of depopulation and for
scientific evidence, including pollen diagrams from bogs, of the consequences for Scandinavia of the
cooling period, see Axel Steenberg, "Archaeological Dating of the Climatic Change in North Europe
about A.D. 1300," Nature, 1951, 168:672-674.
57Carpenter, Discontinuity in Greek Civilization, p. 15.
58Lamb, "Our Changing Climate, Past and Present," pp. 10-12, and "On the Nature of Certain Climatic
Variations," pp. 65-66; LeRoy Ladurie, Times of Feast, Ch. 4, "The Problems of the 'Little Ice Age'," pp.
129-226.
59LeRoy Ladurie, Times of Feast, pp. 23-40, 270, and H. C. Fritts, Tree Rings and Climate (New York:
Academic Press, 1976); see esp. Fig. 8.9.
60LeRoy Ladurie, Times of Feast, pp. 244-254.
61See Lamb, "Our Changing Climate," in The Flora of a Changing Britain, ed. F. Perring (London: The
Botanical Society of the British Isles, 1974), p. 13; "The Early Medieval Warm Epoch," pp. 30-3 1; "Our
Changing Climate, Past and Present," pp. 7-8; and "Britain's Climate in the Past," p. 191.
This content downloaded from 141.210.2.69 on Sun, 10 Apr 2016 17:27:01 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
ANGLO-SAXON PLANT REMEDIES 263
berland up to a height of 1,050 feet for some two centuries until 1250 or 1300.
Cultivation has not been attempted there subsequently.62
It is difficult to assess precisely the implications of this xerothermic period for
floristic zones in Anglo-Saxon England.63 Many factors other than temperature and
rainfall must be considered, factors like biotype variation, soil content,64 and the
Anglo-Saxon plowing which altered floristic zones in England.65 Furthermore, there
are plant distributions, like that of the strawberry tree, Arbutus unedo L. (Mediterranean region and three counties in Ireland), that defy explanation.66 Nonetheless, the
period when Anglo-Saxon medical texts calling for Mediterranean plants were
copied (10-12th centuries) and when Anglo-Saxon herbals of Mediterranean origin
were illustrated (1050 and 1100) was an era of comparatively warm, dry summers, an
important characteristic of Mediterranean floristic zones.67 While I do not suggest
that the Mediterranean plants represented in the herbals grew wild in Anglo-Saxon
England, I would argue that it would not have been difficult to cultivate them during
the minimal climatic optimum, and there is some scientific evidence of the introduc-
tion of plants during this era. Palynological evidence indicates that the woad, Isatis
tinctoria L., prescribed in the Old English Herbarium Apulei and mentioned five
times in the Laeceboc and once in the Lacnunga, was cultivated in England during the
Anglo-Saxon period.68 Similarly, the Mediterranean peony, Paeonia mascula (L.)
Mill., a plant celebrated for its medical use in the Herbarium Apulei, is found
naturalized in England only at Steep Holm, on the grounds of a thirteenth-century
Augustinian priory; it was formerly found growing on the site of the abbey near
Winchcombe in Gloucestershire, an eighth-century foundation.69
PLANT CULTIVATION: THE HERB GARDEN
That the presence in England of two Mediterranean medical plants named in AngloSaxon remedy books seems to result from Anglo-Saxon cultivation is a crucial point
for this paper and one which raises a final area of concern in the matter of AngloSaxon knowledge of Mediterranean plants-that of the monastic herb garden. It is
important to emphasize the easily overlooked implications of the minimal climatic
optimum that made cultivation of southern plants easier, but the cultivation practices
62Lamb, "Our Changing Climate," The Flora of a Changing Britain, p. 13.
63J. P. Savidge, "Changes in Plant Distribution following Changes in Local Climate," in The Flora of a
Changing Britain, pp. 25-31.
64Ann P. Conolly and Eilif Dahl, "Maximum Summer Temperature in Relation to the Modern and
Quaternary Distributions of Certain Arctic-Montane Species in the British Isles," in Studies in the
Vegetational History of the British Isles: Essays in Honour of Harry Godwin, ed. D. Walker and R. G.
Westeds (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), pp. 159-167.
65Godwin, History of British Flora, pp. 477-479. See also Oliver Rackham, Hayley Wood: Its History
and Ecology (Cambridge: Cambridgeshire and Isle of Ely Naturalists' Trust, 1975), pp. 41-44.
66Godwin, History of British Flora, p. 294, and Polunin, Flowers of Europe, pp. 296-297.
670n Mediterranean climate and plant life, see Oleg Polunin and Anthony Huxley, Flowers of the
Mediterranean (London: Chatto and Windus, 1965), pp. 1-14. See also C. D. Piggott, "The Response of
Plants to Climate and Climatic Changes," in The Flora of a Changing Britain, pp. 32-44.
68Godwin, History of British Flora, p. 480. The Old English word is wad. For the Old English PseudoApuleius herbal, see Cockayne, Leechdoms, Vol. I, p. 174, and for the Latin text, see Howald and Sigerist,
Antonii Musae, p. 127. See Bierbaumer, Der botanische Wortschatz des Altenglischen, Teil I and II, s.v.
wad. The plant was also used as a source of dye and may have been gathered in this connection, if not
cultivated, by the blue-painted Britons encountered by the Romans.
69For the Old English text, see Cockayne, Leechdoms, Vol. I, pp. 168-170, and for the Latin text,
Howald and Sigerist, Antonii Musae, pp. 120-121. On its growth on the site of medieval monastic houses,
see Nancy Jenkins, "Medieval Monastic Accounts, Medicines and Spices," The Pharmaceutical Journal,
1954, 4th Ser., 118 (172): 515-516; Polunin and Huxley, Flowers of the Mediterranean, p. 66, and Polunin,
Flowers of Europe, p. 110.
This content downloaded from 141.210.2.69 on Sun, 10 Apr 2016 17:27:01 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
264
LINDA
E.
VOIGTS
bear examination in their own right. We are, after all, not so much dealing with
native floral populations as we are with pampered plants grown within the cloister
walls that radiate heat and provide shelter from the wind-plants that are weeded,
mulched, and watered, in many instances annuals, for which the question of winter
hardiness is irrelevant.70 Indeed, the history of cultivated plants is quite a different
matter from the history of floristic zones of indigenes.71
Medieval herb gardens represent a continuation of an ancient institution. Pliny in
the book of the Historia naturalis which deals with plants produced "by Mother
Earth for medicinal purposes only" tells of having examined nearly all the plants of
which he writes in the special garden of the botanical authority Antonius Castor.72
We know as well that the Romans made some effort to acclimatize delicate plants
from other regions; evidence remains of special buildings, with windows of talc and
heated by flues, for sheltering plants in winter.73 While there is no proof of continuity
between the Roman and medieval gardens in transalpine Europe, it should be
pointed out that gardens were found with Roman villas on the Moselle and the
Rhine, and one would assume that villas in Roman Britain carried on the practice as
well.74 The significance of the gardens of antiquity is that the cultivated garden plants
of Rome became the cultivated garden plants of Europe, at least until 1560; and as
recently as the nineteenth century an analysis of German peasant gardens concluded
that the plants contained therein were of Greek or Latin origin, plants mentioned in
Dioscorides, Pliny, and other antique writers.75
Valuable records of plant cultivation from the early Middle Ages survive in the
garden lists from the court of Charlemagne. Two shorter lists are found in the
inventories of five royal estates; the estate of Asnapius lists twenty herbs and
vegetables and eight trees, and the estate of Treola inventories twenty-seven and
ten.76 Of even greater interest is the Capitulare de Villis, circa 800, which reflects the
estate reforms of either Charlemagne or his son, Louis the Pious. The Capitulare
contains a royal command giving the names of seventy-two vegetables and medicinal
plants and sixteen fruit and nut trees to be grown in the garden, "Volumus quod in
horto omnes herbas habeant, id est lilium, rosas, fenigrecum, costum, .. ."77 Many of
these plants and trees are southern, such as cumin, capers, figs, but there is no reason
to think that the emperor was not quite serious in his wish to have the plants grown in
his gardens, and indeed, it is not unlikely that many of the plants could have been
grown with careful cultivation. It has been suggested that Carolingian gardeners
acclimatized southern and eastern plants which Charles acquired as a result of his
70E.g., cumin, Cuminum cyminum L., listed both in the Capitulare de villis of Charlemagne and in the
Saint Gall cloister plan, is an annual.
7'For an invaluable introduction to the history of cultivated plants, see the 1964 Masters Lectures,
William T. Stearn, "The Origin and Later Development of Cultivated Plants," Journal of the Royal
Horticultural Society, 1965, 90:279-291, 322-340.
72Historia naturalis XXV 5, 9, ed. W. H. S. Jones, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 1966), Vol. VII, p. 142. Pliny here uses the word hortulus as does Walahfrid some
centuries later; the word seems to have a more precise meaning than simply the diminutive form of hortus.
73Henry Inigo Triggs, Garden Craft in Europe (London: Batsford, [1913]), p. 9.
74Marie Luise Gothein, A History of Garden Art, ed. Walter P. Wright, trans. Mrs. Archer-Hind (New
York: Dutton, 1928), Vol. I, pp. 127-130.
75Stearn, "Origin," pp. 324-326.
76Capitularia Regum Francorum, ed. A. Boretius, Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Leg. Sec. 2
(Hanover, 1883). For a brief but useful discussion and bibliography and translation of the inventories, see
Henry R. Loyn and John Percival, The Reign of Charlemagne: Documents on Carolingian Government
and Administration (London: Edward Arnold, 1975), pp. 98, 103, 105. See also Rudolph von Fischer-
Benzon, Altdeutsche Gartenflora (Keil: Lipsius und Tischer, 1894), pp. 5, 181-182.
77 Capitularia Regum Francorum, Vol. I, pp. 82-91. See also Loyn and Percival, Reign of Charlemagne,
pp. 64-65, 73; Fischer-Benzon, Gartenflora, pp. 5, 183-184; and Stearn, "Origin," pp. 324-325.
This content downloaded from 141.210.2.69 on Sun, 10 Apr 2016 17:27:01 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
ANGLO-SAXON PLANT REMEDIES 265
dealings with the Caliph Haroun-al-Rashid.78
The continental records which are more germane to an Anglo-Saxon focus than
royal documents are those describing monastic herb gardens, for literate AngloSaxon culture was dominated by monasticism, and the surviving Anglo-Saxon
medical texts seem to be the products of monastic scriptoria.79 Numbered among the
continental monastic records is the famous plan for the exemplary Carolingian
monastery, the Saint Gall cloister, which depicts elaborate facilities for the care of the
sick and a herb garden with sixteen plots designated by the names of medicinal
plants. The medical garden, adjacent to the domus medicorum, should not be
confused with the vegetable garden with designations for eighteen plants, or the
orchard-cum-cemetery diagram representing both graves and fruit and nut trees.80 As
in the case of the Capitulare, we find cumin and figs named.81 The most personal
account of a monastic herb garden is in the Hortulus of Walahfrid Strabo, Abbot of
Reichenau, 838-849, a poem which celebrates the labor of the garden and considers
twenty-nine plants, twenty-one of which he has cultivated. Recounting the effort
involved in hacking out nettles, building up the beds, spreading manure, and carrying
water, the poem tells of some plants grown from seed, others from stocks, of training
gourds on props, of the superiority of the betony of the garden over that which grows
wild, of drying plants to store for the winter. It is clear that the abbot speaks from a
genuine involvement with the cultivation of plants when he celebrates in hexameters
the medicinal values of the plants he raises.82 Another poem by a continental monk
dealing with remedies to be obtained from seventy-seven plants was also popular in
the Middle Ages. In fact, the plant names from the "De virtutibus herbarum" of
Macer (Odo of Meung) have already been mentioned; they are found with Old
English glosses in Cotton Vitellius C. iii, on the folio preceding the Old English
illustrated Pseudo-Apuleius herbal.83
Unfortunately, our records of Anglo-Saxon monastic gardens are not so rich as
those for the Continent. We do know, however, that there was a garden at Ely from
the seventh century on,84 and that the first abbot was famed for his planting and
grafting skills in the garden and orchard.85 Similarly, another East Anglian house,
Thorney, which is not far from Ely and like Ely has already been mentioned for its
vineyards, was famous for its tree garden and the luxuriant growth of its plants.86 The
proximity of these two fenland houses with a reputation for horticulture and viniculture may be more than a coincidence. Neither is remote from Bury Saint Edmunds
where Bodley 130 was painted, and I have argued elsewhere that the conventions of
the monastic dedication page in the vernacular illustrated Herbarium Apulei suggest
78Gothein, A History of Garden Art, Vol. I, p. 190.
79Although we do not know the origin of all the surviving Anglo-Saxon remedy books, we do know that
Bodley 130 was a product of Bury Saint Edmunds, that the unique manuscript containing the Lw?ceboc
was copied at the Old Minster, Winchester, and that the monastic dedication page (fol. 1 lv) in Cotton
Vitellius C. iii tells us something about the origin of that codex (for a discussion of the dedication page, see
Voigts, "A New Look," pp. 44-60).
80See P. Jung, "Das Infirmarium im Bauriss des Klosters von St. Gallen vom Jahre 820," Gesnerus,
1949, 6:1-8, and Figs. 1-2; Walter Horn, "On the Origins of the Medieval Cloister,' Gesta, 1973,
12:46-48, and Figs. 1, 48; and Fischer-Benzon, Gartenflora, pp. 184-187.
81Gothein does not think that the fig or laurel could have been grown at Saint Gall (A History of Garden
Art, Vol. I, p. 175), but again I believe that judgment overlooks the characteristics of the xerothermic
period and the circumstances of monastic horticulture.
82 The Hortulus of Walahfrid Strabo (see above, n. 40), and Fischer-Benzon, Gartenflora, pp. 187-188.
83See above, n. 33.
84Frank Crisp, Mediaeval Gardens, ed. Catherine Childs Paterson (New York: Brentanos, [1924]), Vol.
1, p. 95.
85Alicia Amherst Cecil, A History of Gardening in England (3rd ed., New York: Dutton, 1910), p. 7.
86See n. 61 and Gothein, A History of Garden Art, Vol. 1, p. 178.
This content downloaded from 141.210.2.69 on Sun, 10 Apr 2016 17:27:01 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
266
LINDA
E.
VOIGTS
that that codex could have originated at an East Anglian monastery like Peterborough, Croyland, Ramsey, Thorney, or Ely.87
While we lack an Anglo-Saxon equivalent of the Saint Gall cloister plan, a postConquest diagram of the abbey at Canterbury may well suggest practices from more
than a century before. In this drawing half of the rectangular cloister is designated
"herbarium," and while it lacks the plant labels of the Saint Gall plan, it does
represent the area filled with stylized drawings of plants.88 The gardener's records
from the Norwich chartulary postdate the Conquest by three hundred years and so
cannot serve to imply Anglo-Saxon practices, although surely the responsibilities and
efforts entailed by the garden are not unique to the later period.89
IMPLICATIONS
The time has surely come to put to rest the notion that the Anglo-Saxons who
compiled, copied, and illustrated the surviving vernacular and Latin remedy books
epitomized the "wilting mind of the Dark Ages." We must discard the first dictum
that the surviving texts represent mindless copying of "sterile formulae," and the
second that the illustrations were of no worth because they are stylized and depict
Mediterranean plants. We must rather look at the sophisticated handling of text by
the Anglo-Saxon makers and users of medical books, at the vernacular revision in the
Herbarium Apulei of the Latin tract on betony, for example, a reorganization that
deletes the nonessential, mostly magical, section and unites the important material
about habitat and preparation of the plant at the beginning of the chapter. We must
also look at the way Anglo-Saxons attempted to make their books as useful as
possible, by adding tables of contents and recipes, by marking recipes with marginal
notations, by providing Latin-vernacular herbal glossaries to Latin remedy books
and glossing Latin plant names with the vernacular labels. We must likewise
acknowledge that Anglo-Saxon abbesses and kings acquired exotic drugs through
informal exchange, largely through ecclesiastics, and similarly, we must consider that
some exotic plants were likely obtained through trade. Most important, we must
admit to the probability that Anglo-Saxon monks and nuns cultivated Mediterranean plants with great care and under more auspicious climatic conditions than exist
today, remembering that plants like peony, formerly not native to Britain, were
naturalized after cultivation during the pre-Conquest era. In short, we must grant
that Anglo-Saxons valued healing plants, that they valued books about healing
plants, and that they dealt with both intelligently.
Two final examples should make this point. The first is a reconsideration of Chap-
ter 5 in the Old English Herbarium Apulei, dealing with hennebelle (Fig. 2). We
have been told that this chapter is useless as it stands in Cotton Vitellius C. iii (fol.
23v) because the illustration does not depict the henbane, Hyoscyamus niger L., that
is now native to England; rather it portrays the Mediterranean Hyoscyamus reticula-
tus L.90 The fact is that Anglo-Saxons knew full well that the hennebelle depicted was
not the dangerous native plant; not only does it not resemble it, but the text carefully
87"A New Look," pp. 43-56.
88The plan, which seems to have been drawn as a guide to the waterworks, the most prominent element
in the sketch, is bound with the Edwine Psalter executed at Saint Augustine's, Canterbury, in the 12th
century, now Cambridge, Trinity College R. 16. 2. See Plt. 228 in Crisp, Mediaeval Gardens, Vol. II.
89These accounts are edited in Cecil, History of Gardening, pp. 9-13. Anglo-Saxon horti and hortuli are
listed in the Domesday Book: T. H. Turner, "Observations on the State of Horticulture in England in
Early Times," Archaeological Journal, 1848, 5:295-297.
90See above, n. 13. The Old English recipe for the hennebelle of fol. 23v is found in Cockayne,
Leechdoms, Vol. I, pp. 94-96, and the Latin (Ch. 4) in Howald and Sigerist, Antonii Musae, pp. 32-34.
This content downloaded from 141.210.2.69 on Sun, 10 Apr 2016 17:27:01 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
ANGLO-SAXON PLANT REMEDIES 267
e~~~<j~i
Figure 2. Hennebelle, c. 1050, Herbarium Apulei (Old English),
Cotton Vitellius C. iii, fol. 23v. (Reproduced by permission of
the British Library.)
distinguishes between the two plants: "peos wyrt fe man symphoniacam nemneti 7
oirum naman belone 7 eac sume men hennebelle hatat wihrt on beganum landum 7
on sandi,um landum 7 on wyrttunum. tonne ys oter Jisse ylcan wyrte sweart on
hiwe. 7 sti5ran leafum 7 eac atrigum. 5onne ys seo arre hwitre 7 heo haftS pas
maenu." (This plant which one calls symphoniaca and others name belone and also
some men call hennebelle grows on cultivated lands and on sandy lands and in
gardens. Then there is another [of] this sort of plant [which is] dark in color and [has]
stiffer leaves and [is] also poisonous. The first one then is the whiter and it has the
powers.) Again, the vernacular text has placed at the beginning of the chapter the
material found at the end of the Latin text, and this is given pride of place to make
certain that the user does not utilize the poisonous native relative of the healing plant
by mistake. The compiler and illustrator did not make a stupid mistake; rather they
made every effort to direct the user to the correct plant. And a correct plant it is, for
after looking through scores of dried varieties of solanaceae one is struck by the
This content downloaded from 141.210.2.69 on Sun, 10 Apr 2016 17:27:01 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
268
LINDA
E.
VOIGTS
verisimilitude of the illustration to the Mediterranean and Turkish varieties of
Hyoscyamus: H. aureus L., H. pusillus L., H. reticulatus L.91
Finally, I think we must take Walahfrid Strabo, the monastic cultivator of plants,
at his word in describing the situation that must have obtained in Anglo-Saxon
England as well as at Reichenau. He speaks of paying a great deal of money for
Indian pepper, and he commends a recipe using pennyroyal for an ailing stomach,
saying he knows for a truth that it works, but he will also grant that wearing a sprig of
pennyroyal behind one's ear is simply a matter of custom and habit.92 Most signifi-
cant, however, he writes that he knows what he does about plants and gardening
because he has learned from common opinion, and from reading ancient books, and
from hard labor. That must surely also be the case with Anglo-Saxon users of plant
remedies, and we must grant them that.
Haec non sola mihi patefecit opinio famae
Vulgaris, quaesita libris nec lectio priscis;
Sed labor et studium, quibus otia longa dierum
Postposui, expertum rebus docuere probatis.93
91 For a number of helpful illustrations, see A. I. Poyarkova, "Contributions to the Systematics of the
Species Henbane Related to Hyoscyamus Reticulatus L.," Journal Botanique de l'URSS, 1942,
27:117-130. While Pliny discusses four varieties of Hyoscyamus (XXV 17, 35-37), I do not think the
Anglo-Saxon herbal tradition draws on this discussion. If anything, the Anglo-Saxon treatment resembles
in some points Pliny's distinction between black and white hellebore (XXV 21, 48-52).
92Hortulus, pp. 52-54.
93Ibid., p. 24. The poetic translation by Raef Payne, p. 25, reads:
This I have learnt not only from common opinion
And searching about in old books, but from experienceExperience of hard work and sacrifice of many days
When I might have rested, but chose instead to labor.
This content downloaded from 141.210.2.69 on Sun, 10 Apr 2016 17:27:01 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms